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WHISTLING SHADE |
by Sten Johnson
Fiver: There's something very queer about the warren
this evening.
Hazel: Is it dangerous?
Fiver: It's not exactly danger, it's ... oh, I don't know.
Something oppressive. Like thunder.
-Watership Down
Matthew Arnold once defined criticism as a “disinterested endeavor,” one of the most optimistic ideas ever recorded. The reality is more complex. For example, how does one analyze films or books where an intensely emotional response dominates the experience? Sentiment is destined to intrude.
As I began to write about the 1978 animated film of Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down 36 years after I first saw it in the theater, I found myself unable to compose a conventional account or critique. There was another story in the background, a tale combining a cultural moment, a unique and haunting film, and the heightened sensitivity of a developing mind. In that spirit, what follows is a “critical memoir” filtered through the eyes of youth.
When I was a child in the 1970s, the Grand Theater was the only cinema in my hometown of Northfield, Minnesota, and one of its few entertainment options. In the days before home video and the Internet, its limited offerings linked us through common experience, reinforcing the intimacy of our tranquil but insular college town. Converted from a 19th century playhouse, the Grand offered one screen and a cavernous environment lined with dusty artificial plants and decorative filigree more suggestive of gothic decline than quaint small town glories. By the mid-1980s, the Grand had closed. An imperishable fixture of downtown, it still remains open in a purgatorial state for "special events."
As a young moviegoer I was instinctively drawn to animation, or at least I accepted the received idea that the genre is intended for children. Disney reissues were a mainstay at the Grand in the 70s, including the now-maligned Song of the South, as the studio sank into an aesthetic and commercial drought. In 1978, at the age of nine, I had seen and enjoyed Pete’s Dragon, an endearing and ambitious mix of live action and animated elements that otherwise followed the studio’s hidebound musical format. That film was a technical anomaly and a rare new release, a clear attempt to capitalize on the fleeting charms of the hybrid live/animated scenes in Mary Poppins.
Towards the end of the same year, two new major animated features, The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down, arrived in theatres. Both films filled Disney’s commercial vacuum and featured remarkably left-field pedigrees. Wizards and Fritz the Cat director Ralph Bakshi helmed Rings, a counterculture icon with a patented interest in racy, gauche themes and imagery. Watership Down, adapted from Richard Adams’ 1972 bestselling novel, was an independent British production directed by Martin Rosen, best known as a producer of Ken Russell’s 1969 adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.
True to the zeitgeist of the late 1970s, my reading had entered a Tolkien phase. I had finished The Hobbit and most of The Lord of the Rings and was also an aficionado of the 1977 Rankin-Bass production of The Hobbit. When the animated film appeared on network TV, a battalion of neighbors descended on one of the few houses on our street with color TV to witness an event as sacrosanct as the moon landing or the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. I listened to a boxed, three-LP set of its soundtrack, dialogue and all, nearly every day, and constantly revisited the musical interlude “Down, Down to Goblin Town,” which paired Tolkien’s original lyrics to a near-disco beat.
As a Tolkien devotee, I counted the days until The Lord of the Rings opened at the Grand in November of 1978. But when I finally took my seat, any high hopes were dashed as I watched the forlorn spectacle unfolding on the screen. Desultory characters, simple and inexpressive in design, did not look like my minds-eye vision of Frodo, Gandalf and Sam. The narrative was confusing and disjointed. Most criminally, Bakshi employed a cut-rate rotoscoping technique for much of the film, applying a minor overlay of animation to costumed actors, raising basic aesthetic questions: Why animate at all? Why not employ the unlimited palette of animation if it’s available? When Gandalf confronts the demonic Balrog, an actor adorned with a mask and flimsy wings tiptoes forward like a player in a stylized Cantonese opera, more of a tame mythic archetype than a fierce denizen of the Pit.
I mercilessly dissected the film’s shortcomings with my friends afterwards, and its flaws fueled our youthful connoisseurs’ sense of injustice. Most infamously, the film grinds to an unexpected halt with the Battle of Helm’s Deep as Tolkien’s plot implodes hundreds of pages short of its true conclusion. Our critiques were passionate and exhaustive, and filled with the aggrieved sense that Bakshi had violated the sacred rules of Tolkien’s universe—not the strictures of the real world or lived experience, but the artificial laws of Middle Earth, only obliquely linked to the exigencies of life through myth and the melancholy of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Without sincere good will from their audience, works of pure fancy disintegrate easily. My interest in Bakshi’s low-rent cinematic house of cards collapsed; I soon forgot the film and returned to Tolkien’s books.
Watership Down arrived at the Grand within the next month. I was less familiar with Adams’ novel than The Lord of the Rings, but the film’s enigmatic poster of a rabbit in silhouette lurching skywards piqued my interest. What did the scene really depict? In the end, I imagined an iconic image of flight or exploration, a signpost for rousing adventure. A friend’s mother saw the film on opening night and recommended it to my parents, mentioning its respected literary source along with its stellar voice talent, including John Hurt (fresh from a star turn as Caligula in the BBC’s I, Claudius), Ralph Richardson, Richard Briers and Denholm Elliot. In a town where Masterpiece Theatre enthusiasts outnumbered Starsky and Hutch viewers, this endorsement sealed the deal. My entire family set out for an evening of edifying, tasteful British entertainment on the big screen.
What followed remains the most powerful movie going experience of my life.
My reaction to Watership Down was undeniably complex. It's tempting to seek epiphanies solely from the high canon of the arts but, in reality, Olympian high culture is consumed dispassionately. Equal or greater emotional power lurks in more commonplace things: rock songs, favorite dolls, old cars, popular cultural artifacts and childhood bric-a-brac that tie us to inescapable origins and human weaknesses. The impact of those things is often ineffable, as was the power of the astonishing film that appeared on the screen.
Watership Down opens with a stylized rabbit creation myth. The trickster rabbit demigod El-ahrairah’s people have multiplied beyond control, so the god Frith endows other animals with traits designed to capture and kill the overpopulated rabbits: claws, the ability to fly, and teeth. The rabbit is the "Prince of a Thousand Enemies,” gifted with speed and wiles but always in mortal danger. The ethereal Black Rabbit of Death is both Charon and Grim Reaper, ready to bear off the fallen to an indeterminate afterlife, serving lord Frith and his natural laws with elegant logic and obedience.
After this remarkable sequence, the film then shifts to harder, earthbound realities and a naturalistic style of animation. Rabbits feed on a hillside during early evening, a scene so languidly pastoral that it can only be dispelled by trauma. These are not the benign, anthropomorphized animals of Disney, but anatomically correct fauna engaged in natural behavior. But then one speaks.
Fiver (Richard Briers) addresses his brother Hazel (John Hurt) with a fearful omen, announcing, “The field…it’s covered in blood,” a speech uncannily similar to Cassandra’s prophecy in Aeschylus' Agamemnon. In her vision, palace walls drip with portentous gore; in Fiver’s revelation, luridly visualized on the screen, a primordial sphere drains lifeblood over the pasture. His premonitions appear to be part instinct, part inexpressible poetic revelation, and he struggles to articulate the specific danger, which he believes has doomed the warren to destruction. Like Cassandra, always destined to be misunderstood, Fiver fails to convince most of the warren of impending disaster.
The viewer is then immersed in a natural of world of stark beauty and danger as a small band of rabbits led by Hazel and Fiver depart their fated community in search of a new life and a cycle of adventures. Maybe “adventure,” with its suggestion of conventional heroics and derring-do, is the wrong word. Within minutes of the group’s departure, a hawk swoops from the sky and kills the rabbit Violet. The others continue on, undaunted.
I found that sense of contingency, of unpredictable death and violence, nearly unbearable. Scenes that are merely tense in Adams’ novel are bloody, graphic and punishingly literal onscreen. In one sequence, the rabbits reach a mysterious warren with decadent and strangely indolent inhabitants. The reason for their behavior is soon revealed as the stout Bigwig (Michael Graham Cox) stumbles into a snare, bleeding and foaming at the mouth as he chokes; this was the image of the enigmatic poster, omitting the bloodstained details. Presumed dead, Bigwig survives when his comrades release the noose, but this startling episode sets a bleak, anxious tone that continues throughout the film.
The fate of the rabbits’ departed warren is also soon revealed as Captain Holly, originally mistaken for the Black Rabbit himself, arrives as one of its sole survivors, wounded and desperate. He tells the harrowing story of the community’s destruction by humans and the death of the remaining rabbits by poison gas, an act depicted in a virtuoso, stylized sequence where terrified victims burrow to a tragic end as machinery roars pitilessly overhead. The grim delirium of that scene, where hapless rabbits’ heads merge en masse in a churning kaleidoscope of death, transcends even the bloody literalism of the film’s earlier scenes; the arbitrary cruelty of man upon animal takes on a kind of cosmic, irrational horror that transgresses the elegant, if ruthless, laws of nature.
Fleeting, lyrical moments of peace relieve such episodes of pitch darkness. Hazel, Fiver and the rabbits reach their new home of Watership Down, a lush English hillside that could have been transposed from Kenneth Grahame’s pastoral reveries, but their concerns continue. Without mates, they cannot sustain their community and a new quest begins.
Here, Hazel emerges as a profoundly compelling character, summoning unforeseen reserves of bravado. John Hurt’s voice, expressive, introspective, gravelly and low-register, defies sonorous heroic stereotypes but lends a convincing gravity to his reluctant hero, who attempts a daring mission to a nearby farm to release captive female rabbits. Braving a dog and a cat, he releases the rabbits only to be shot as he attempts to escape. His fate is ambiguous until Fiver experiences another premonition: Hazel is alive and requires rescue. The following sequence is mildly ethereal in Adams’ novel but takes on an otherworldly, agonizing pathos in the film as the Black Rabbit of Death, an apparition soaring gracefully through twilit skies, leads Fiver across a hallucinatory, visionary landscape. Spiraling, abstract images accompany the wraithlike, echoing presence of Art Garfunkel’s dark ballad “Bright Eyes” as the Black Rabbit finally leads Fiver to a drainpipe where Hazel lies wounded.
Man is not the only threat to the new colony. In its final act, Watership accelerates to a final battle against an invading fascistic warren led by the fearsome General Woundwort. That mêlée ends with an intervention from further up the food chain as a dog unleashed by Hazel attacks Woundwort's malignant soldiers, grabbing them by their throats and tossing them aside, arteries shredded, true to canine form. There is nothing unnatural about the behavior depicted, which is shown in all its guileless, unvarnished brutality. As the rabbit Strawberry says to Woundwort before battle, “Animals don't behave like men… If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. They have dignity and animality.”
The battle won, the film’s epilogue quickly reverses the intensity of the previous scenes, retreating into pastoral harmony. In a devastating sequence, we see an aged and infirm Hazel, limping through the grass like Keats’ hare in "The Eve of St. Agnes." He is now the respected leader of the warren, but he has reached the autumn of his life. A dark, levitating figure appears and asks Hazel if he knows him. "Yes, my Lord," he replies as he recognizes the Black Rabbit of Death, who gently assures him that his offspring grazing on the hillside will be safe. Hazel's spirit departs his dying body and the two ghostly figures bound into the distance. Spared a violent death, he vigorously greets the afterlife.
As with The Lord of the Rings, I saw the film with mature and critical eyes. But the extreme discord between animated form and dark content overpowered me. I was prepared to critique every sandal strap, fang and notched arrow in Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings, but ill-equipped for a poetic meditation on the world’s cruelty. I could digest unalloyed fantasy, but not the pitilessness of nature illuminated by fiction. Arriving home, I cried uncontrollably, mainly at the vision of Hazel's death. My dad thoughtfully explained that I was unprepared to see violence in animated form. My mother, also shocked, complained about my friend's mother's recommendation. This was not a household appreciation of artistic gravitas. It was a deeply felt sense of violation.
Visceral impact aside, is Watership Down a good film? I'd strongly argue yes, with very minor qualifications. Small imperfections lie in its now-dated animation technology, which has passed from the world of hand illustration to digital extravagance. While excellent in art direction and character design, movement is occasionally sketchy in scenes of rapid action. The use of watercolor matte backgrounds may also appear anachronistic to some viewers, but I find the approach to be often beautiful, reminiscent of a luminous stage background. This is animation produced with an eye to painterly effect, rather than the blinding verisimilitude of three-dimensional digital; it wields the oblique suggestive power of oil on canvas.
Small technical limitations do not diminish Watership Down’s overall achievement, which remains unique in western animation. It may only be comparable to Japanese “anime”, chiefly Hayao Miyazaki’s work with Studio Ghibli, which has also explored serious themes through the medium, most memorably in the pitch-black World War II drama The Grave of the Fireflies. As in Watership, Miyazaki is fond of dislocating, dreamlike sequences that offer withering depictions of the world’s hardships, fables that protest humanity’s darkest and most shameful traits.
Watership endures thanks to the same ambitious, unapologetic commitment to its bleak and truthful themes. Unlike Tolkien’s archetypal, ritual depictions of violence, it restores to fiction what we’ve sought to obscure and soften through pure myth; it serves up life’s darkest experiences with a heady mixture of blunt reality and lyricism. I was right to feel violated on that first viewing, but it was the kind of illuminating shock that accompanies provocative, unvarnished truths. Lest I exaggerate the merits of Watership’s cultural moment, it reminds me of poet Ted Joans' comment that jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler's sound was "like screaming in Saint Patrick's Cathedral on a crowded Easter Sunday." Like Ayler’s grating avant-garde cacophony, Watership is an attempt to capture the scream, however discordant, of a broken world in agony.
To this day, Watership Down haunts me. It transports me to a youthful moment of intense emotional vulnerability and shows me that childhood differs from popular conception: the state of youth is more nuanced, more attuned to the darker shadows of experience, less halcyon and romantically encircled by a halo of sweetness and light. But children also remain unformed, and that acute impressionability and capacity for pure wonder and revelation is an unacknowledged gift.
Just as the adult is more alive in the child than we imagine, so is the child alive in the adult. I did not watch Watership Down again for 26 years, when I rented it on impulse. I had thought about that initial viewing for years, and its indelible impressions had actually seemed an adequate substitute for another viewing. Why revisit a film that had already wielded such impact? But my curiosity got the best of me; part of me wanted to know if the film was really worthy of the uncanny power that it had wielded in my youth, part of me wanted it to be dismissible, like the Star Wars bubblegum cards I had discarded in childhood.
I was startled by the experience, which was an impenetrable fusion of memory-of-memory and something inexpressible. The film’s power returned with shocking precision, transporting me to another age and time. Like Proust’s madeleine (albeit one dipped in rabbit’s blood), it summoned the past directly, not as a perceived memory but as a fully restored moment from 1978. The uniqueness of the sensation, which I have never felt with any other film, confirmed its distinctive force. Like my 9-year-old self, I was shocked by Bigwig’s struggle in the snare and filled with tension as Fiver rescued his wounded brother. I finally cried during the final scene of Hazel’s death, completing the emotional reenactment of that decades-past event. Startled, I decided to re-watch the epilogue several days later. It brought me to tears again.
That final scene remains one of the most powerful in cinema. It unsparingly tells us that a hero’s rewards are neither gold, nor the princess’ hand, nor a bloody dragon’s carcass at the victor’s feet, but the gift of a peaceful death after a life of incessant peril and risk. Ingmar Bergman has never expressed a more fundamental truth with such concision. Other films have more sophisticated craft, higher budgets, and more incisive explorations of philosophical themes. But the sight of Hazel’s weary concession to mortality is like watching the death of a friend rather than a cinematic meditation on a distant theme.
I still see the Black Rabbit of Death every day, at least figuratively. In the lobby of my apartment building, a lithograph of an ethereal, sketchy hare hangs over a majestic fireplace, looking remarkably (but likely unintentionally) like the lapin Grim Reaper. Passing by, I always envision the spirit of Hazel racing across the fields, through trees, into the undying sun, and perhaps into final peace.
All the world will be your enemy, Prince of a Thousand
enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But
first they must catch you; digger, listener, runner, Prince
with the swift warning. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and
your people will never be destroyed.